A (Very) Short History of Abortion in the United States

In light of the expected overturning of Roe v Wade, I wanted to look at the not-so-long history of abortion as a political issue in the United States today.

First, let's burst a bubble.

The Founding Fathers whom conservatives idolize so much did not outlaw abortion.

What many people might find surprising about that statement is the underlying fact that abortion even existed in the 1700s. So let's take a quick detour. Not only were abortions performed in Colonial times; we have evidence of artificially-induced abortions going back thousands of years in civilizations all over the world, using a variety of methods, from surgical to herbal. And I emphasize 'artificially-induced' because as any ob/gyn can tell you, Nature herself performs far more abortions than humans do themselves: 30-40% of all pregnancies are terminated by the human body itself in spontaneous abortion or miscarriage.

Now back to those old White guys in powdered wigs...

Before a shift in doctrine beginning in the 19th century, and accelerating in the 20th, the mainstream Protestant belief in force at the time our country was founded was that life didn’t begin until “quickening,” at a minimum 15 weeks, often about 20. Until then, abortions were allowed, and it was definitely not considered “murder.” It was procedure, albeit admittedly a risky one, given the poor hygiene and medical practices of the day. So if you pictured our Founding Fathers solemnly devoting themselves to a policy of respecting the sanctity of unborn life, think again. Their belief, shared by the Catholic Church (on which more below), was that a fetus had no soul until it quickened roughly halfway through the pregnancy.

Only much later did conservative American politicians realize that abortion was an opportunity to create a divide among people and to control women, their two favorite pastimes in my experience. Meanwhile, the Catholic Church held substantially the same belief as Protestants. Abortion was a non-issue all the way up until 1869, when Pius IX did a 180 and turned the supposedly eternal and consistent Church into enemies of something they’d previously had no problem with whatsoever. Prior to that, the doctrine was in lockstep with Protestant belief, albeit with a different lexicon: in the language of the Vatican, life began upon “ensoulment,” which corresponds to that same notion of “quickening” Protestants had always embraced, i.e. around 15-20 weeks into the pregnancy. So where do Christians in America stand today? Now, of course, it is a very political issue, and if you observe the actual numbers, it is one rife with hypocrisy. It works like this: If you’re a Christian woman (or, say, a Republican Christian politician with a pregnant mistress) and you need access to a safe abortion, you get it. Indeed, 70% of all abortions are performed on women who identify as Christians, and 23% of those are evangelicals. That means that every year, there are approximately 100,000 evangelicals terminating their pregnancies, and about another 340,000 non-evangelical Christian women terminating theirs. But if you’re a Christian and someone else needs an abortion, that is apparently very wrong and that person is going to hell, and they must be prevented from accessing safe abortion care. This has serious consequences for women's health. Completely putting aside considerations of risks tied to such issues as giving birth too young or while suffering certain medical conditions, childbirth is at the best of times a risky thing, resulting in the death of the mother 14 times more often than a safe, legal abortion performed by a doctor does.

The point of this essay is not to change anyone’s mind about abortion. I am not up to that task.

But regardless of your feelings about the issue, let’s all deal in verifiable facts.

Being “pro-life” isn’t about your Bible and it’s not about your religion’s long-standing beliefs about abortion or the nature of life's beginning, because the Bible never even mentions this medical procedure, and your religion had no problem with it until a relatively short time ago, going back less than 8% of its history. Abortion is now solely about politics, and it’s about controlling women in service to a very specific political agenda in that sphere. Religion is simply a convenient excuse, as it so often is when evil people need to justify evil actions that deprive others of their fundamental rights and human dignity.

Finally GETting it: the 2012 GET (Genomes, Environments and Traits) Conference, Boston, 25 April 2012

As I mentioned in one of my very first blog posts, I am participating in the Personal Genome Project led by Dr. George Church of Harvard. (Read that post here to get a quick overview of the project.) For the past couple of years, they have had a one-day conference (Genomes, Environments, Traits, or GET) at Harvard Medical School to discuss progress as well as host presentations on related themes and trends. Participants in the study are invited to attend free of charge, so I stopped by to enjoy some very interesting lectures on a wide range of topics, as well as to get a full update on the progress of the project.

And OK, I admit it: I also wanted to meet Dr. Church.* I have always found the idea of ‘celebrity’ rather horrifying. With the exception of a book-signing, I wouldn’t be caught dead asking someone for an autograph, and I firmly reject the idea that just because someone (e.g. actors) is in the limelight, s/he is somehow worthy of our affection and praise. And I believe that if you admire someone for his or her convictions or policies or work, then you should admire the product (i.e. ideas), not the person (who is as fallible as you). In other words, I don’t really do hero-worship, and I don’t have any ‘rock stars’. But Dr. Church is as close as I will ever come to having a hero. His audacious project to sequence 100,000 genomes has the potential to have a greater impact than any other single scientific undertaking in medical history. I realize this doesn’t make him as fame-worthy as, say, an accomplished person like Kim Kardashian or Paris Hilton, but it’s good enough for me.

For me, the most interesting part of the day was the update on the project itself. The whole team was there, each updating on his or her area of responsibility (bioethics, legal, operations, etc.). They then fielded questions from the group of us there. The question I wanted to ask (but didn’t have to because apparently everyone was thinking it and someone else posed it first) was, isn’t the project terribly skewed towards a certain subset of the population? First there’s education and IQ: since they aren’t aggressively advertising it yet, they are getting mostly people who have a higher educational level; and since they require everyone to pass a test on the basics of genetics, risk and privacy issues at stake, it will also skew towards the more intelligent. Also, looking around the room, I saw a majority male and majority white audience (though admittedly I don’t know for sure how representative that was of the overall participant pool). Add to that the fact that one must be an American citizen to participate and it does seem a little imbalanced. There really wasn’t much of an answer for that. For the educational/IQ and American citizen issues, those are all related to legal/informed consent/privacy requirements, so they can’t really budge there for now. As for ethnicity and sex, presumably at some point they will be making a wider push for more participants and attempt to balance things then.

And that brings me to the next thing I noticed: despite the fact it’s been up and running for a few years now, it is still very early days, so patience is the key word here. There’s so much more to it than simply soliciting, receiving and processing DNA. Remember, nothing like this has ever been attempted before, so there is a very steep learning curve here: how best to collect and process so many samples, and with the best maintenance of the samples; even deciding WHAT to sample, since this is also about environment and about getting as wide a spectrum of data as possible; how to handle the interface with participants; all the legal and privacy issues; how best to process all the data to ensure it’s actually turned into something meaningful. The list goes on and on.

As for the numbers, here’s where it stands right now: there are about 2,000 of us in the project. In the first five years of the project, they sequenced 10 genomes (starting with Church’s, who led by example and released all his data); now they are up to about that many per month. The market cost for the process is down to around USD 4-5k, which is already half as much as last time I checked a year or two ago; and the price will continue to plummet as the process is improved and streamlined (which is an important secondary goal of the project).

Besides the project update, there were many fascinating presentations on other subjects, from a CEO who has the goal of achieving the 100-dollar genome, to an incredible project that is achieving the ultimate biomimickry: creating actual miniature bio-synthetic organs on which to do drug trials to ensure greater accuracy and reliability of results (not to mention saving a lot of rats!). That latter one was amazing and the implications for drug research are profound. Take for example asthma drug research. Progress in this area has been (literally painfully) slow. One of the main reasons? Animals simply don’t mimic the human version of asthma very well, so researchers often go down dead-end paths, wasting a lot of time and research money along the way. But imagine growing a biosynthetic lung and testing drugs on them directly. The researcher, Dr. Geraldine Hamilton, showed some pictures of some of the actual organs they had created. Astounding accomplishment both from a technical point of view and in light of its staggering implications.

So what does the future of genetics hold for us? The possibilities are practically endless. As Dr. Church said, we all have some ‘superpower’ in our genes (large or small, whether we are aware of it or not). This can be anything from harder-than-average bones to HIV-resistance. Now imagine identifying thousands of such ‘superpowers’ through large-scale genomic research. Then imagine leveraging that knowledge of individual genes to create therapies for others who lack that particular ‘superpower’. You don’t need much of an imagination to realize that the implications for the future and well-being of humanity are profound.

The future is a wild place, folks. Hold on.

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*For the record, I did get to meet him and speak with him for a few minutes, and was quite proud of myself for not gushing overly much. I think I might even have been relatively coherent.

Art and Science: Whose Business Are They?

About twenty years ago, my (now ex-)wife’s brother told me a story I never forgot, because it resonated so strongly with me. (I can’t recall now if the experience happened to him or if he was relaying something that happened to someone else, but for our purposes here, it doesn't really matter.) He was in Paris on holiday and was visiting the Louvre. As he filed past the Mona Lisa, he overheard the following exchange between an American married couple:

Wife: Well, honey, what do you think?

Husband: What can I say about art? I’m an engineer.

To me, a society in which its engineers do not feel entitled to an opinion about art, is a society in decline. To say that you cannot/should not have an opinion about art because you are not an artist, is like saying you can’t have an opinion about eating because you are not a chef.  Art is an essential human function, one that springs from the core of our humanity.

The same is true about the human yearning to understand the world, as expressed in our pursuit of science and exploration. Besides the fact that I recently saw this former brother-in-law*, I have also been thinking about this story of his because someone asked me why I had blogged about my visit to the Space Symposium, and specifically why I was so interested in the physics of it all. The underlying question seemed to be, “You’re an executive manager with an education in languages and business….what makes you feel qualified to question people like Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Lisa Randall?” My answer is two-fold:

1) Logic is the underpinning of any intellectual endeavor, so any person capable of pursuing a logical line of reasoning may ask questions about any endeavor if the question addresses the logic (not facts) of the expert’s approach. In other words, no, I will never question Lisa Randall’s grasp of quarks and gluons because I am and will always be hopelessly under-qualified even to formulate an intelligent question on that subject. But can I ask a question about the philosophy of science that underpins her approach? Absolutely I can! Can I reasonably question Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s expertise in astrophysics? No. But can I question the logic behind his reasoning that the traditional NASA/publicly-funded approach to exploration must continue to be the dominate paradigm? You bet I can!

2) My second reason ends up where this thought started: not only CAN I question scientific minds about their reasoning and approaches; as an active participant in civil society, as a person interested in science and exploration as expressions of our most fundamental human nature, I MUST ask these questions.

This also harkens back to a very basic fallacy often employed in arguments: that expertise in one thing means that one may not be questioned in any area; or conversely, that ineptitude or evil in one area means one’s opinion may never be trusted in any other arena, e.g., the ‘Hitler wanted xyz, ergo xzy must be evil’ argument. Taken to their logical extremes, this means I may not question a scientist’s sanity if he tells me to jump off a building (‘trust me, I did my PhD in gravity!’), and I may assume dogs are inherently evil since Hitler seemed so fond of his.

So as long as we employ logical reasoning, we both can and should engage scientists about their research and ask the fundamental questions. But let’s circle back to the beginning: what about art? As I said, it’s everyone’s business. But then why do so few scientists seem engaged with art and vice versa? I have been thinking about this a lot of late, prompted to do so by several things. One was reading about Lisa Randall’s artistic foray (in which she wrote the libretto for an opera about science). Another reason is a conversation I just had a few days ago on my flight from Boston to Frankfurt. I was lucky enough to be seated next to an artist who just happened to be working on a project that bridges science and art**, and she mentioned her efforts to engage scientists in this way, specifically a project that would require a high level of collaboration between the two camps. (I am being intentionally vague and cagey here as she mentioned one particular project in confidence as it is still in planning phase, and I don’t want to give away anything until her efforts are public.)

But even when scientists do ‘cross over’, they seem to do so while holding their noses. I hate to keep picking on Dr. Randall, but since I am currently reading her book ‘Knocking on Heaven’s Door’ and it provides a perfect example, I fear I must. On page 128 she notes the aesthetic beauty of the LHC, but then quickly draws back in horror at this idea as she ‘recoil[s] … in thinking of this incredibly precise technological miracle as an art project’. Why is this idea so repulsive, I wonder? What can be more beautiful than such a marvel, and one that seeks to answer many of the exact same questions art has been asking for millennia? Far from recoiling at the idea that the LHC is both art and science, this should be a chance to experience deep wonder at the beauty of the whole endeavor and the way it combines both worlds.

If you’re an artist and you’re smugly agreeing, well, hold on a sec. Artists are just as bad, if not worse. I’ll give you an example. Not long ago, a friend posed the following question on her Facebook page: If you could do a PhD in either art history or economics, which would you choose? Not surprisingly, the people who probably fancied themselves more practical chose the latter, and the more artistically-minded chose the former. But one comment in particular caught my eye. I can’t recall the exact words, but it boiled down to this: why would you choose economics over art history when economics just strips away the soul of things and reduces everything to numbers? This haughty dismissal of the beauty that can await you in the sciences (be they the social or physical sciences or mathematics) is unfortunately quite typical of artists’ reaction to all things scientific. But they are being as close-minded as the disdainful scientist in these cases. Take this specific example of economics. Economics isn’t just math and dollars and GDP. Economics is nothing less than an attempt to delve into the human soul and see what makes it tick, what drives it, what motivates people to behave the way they do. Economics is as much about quirky things like why Israeli mothers might pick up their kids from day school even later when they are fined for it, as it is about the GDP of Liechtenstein. (If you’re scratching your head at that reference, I strongly recommend you read Freakonomics, a must-read for everyone, artist, scientist, lay person alike.) Imagine all the creative possibilities artists are missing out on by being so dismissive of science, then.

So whether you are a scientist thinking about art, an artist thinking about science, or just an average Joe like me thinking about both, please remember: it’s ALL your business, and the more you engage, the better off your society will be.

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*…who by the way is a man whom I have always very deeply respected, and who is (among many, many other things), an engineer who feels quite entitled to have an opinion about art, thank you very much.

**Isn’t it funny the way the universe seems to clump these things into packages for us? A more spiritual person would say it is Fate, or even God. I would say such observations betray simple selection bias and are circular to boot, i.e., I am writing because these things happened to happen, so I can’t say they happened because I wanted to write about them. Similarly, people in a universe in which certain laws of physics had to be precisely calibrated for them to exist cannot claim this as proof of any god; it’s just proof that if things had been off, there’d be no they to consider such things.

Basic Questions that Smarter People Must Answer for Me NOW

If the dinosaurs were killed off in a mass extinction, then how can they simultaneously be the precursors of chickens and other birds? Isn't this sort of an either/or thing? Either they all died off/or they didn't, but rather evolved into modern avians. Or are we saying most died off, but the ones who survived, evolved into that McChicken sandwich? And if the latter, then which died off and which survived to give me chicken nuggets? I would like some clarification here, please. Is T Rex dead or just nibbling corn awaiting his tasty, tasty doom?

The size of the universe. OK, seriously, this makes my head hurt. 1) The universe exploded from an infinitely-small point 13.7B years ago (more or less). 2) The universe is infinite. 3) No object can travel faster than the speed of light. How do you square this circle? If nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, then no object can currently be more than 13.7B light years from the ultimate 'ground zero', ergo the universe must be finite since nothing in the universe can be further away from that defined point than 13.7B light years. Q.E.D. EXCEPT THEY KEEP TELLING ME IT'S NOT FINITE! Ouch. Seriously, someone explain this.

Gene-ious

I said yesterday that I had gotten my genome 'partially sequenced' at 23andme.com. That is not technically accurate: I got genotyped, which is just taking one's DNA and looking at genetic variants (as opposed to sequencing the genome, which is of course far more involved, though in principle it's the same idea). As noted in an earlier post, I have also volunteered for Dr. Church's PGP (Personal Genome Project), which in fact would lead to having my genome entirely sequenced. They are looking for 100,000 total volunteers, but I think that their eyes may be bigger than their wallets on that, at least in the short term.

So why did I do the genotyping? I had a number of motivations:

1) Sheer curiosity. I just wanted to learn more about the process and its efficacy and results.

2) There was probably some morbid curiosity as well: it's not every day one gets insight into what will ultimately kill one. Of course, no one knows for sure how one will die (insert cliché about getting hit by a bus tomorrow yada yada), but genotyping can give you a pretty good picture. For the record: stroke and Alzheimer's are my two most likely means of exiting the stage. Neither came as a great surprise given family history.

3) A peek into my children's future. What I have as genetic predisposition or as recessive carrier trait can of course impact future generations. Interestingly, as far as carrier traits, I had...zilch. From Alpha-1 Antitrypsin Deficiency to Torsion Dystonia, I seem pretty much devoid of any unfortunate recessive carrier baggage.

4) Taking control of my health. Knowing that I am 25% more likely than the general population to suffer from stroke or other events or maladies stemming from atrial fibrillation, I am certainly going to be more careful about heart health. Knowing that I am twice as likely as others to develop Alzheimer's means I am certainly going to figure out a more obvious place to keep my keys. And on the other side of the coin, I am going to relax a little bit about type II diabetes: while it may be present in my family, I am far less likely than most people to develop it myself. And most interestingly, I even have some insight into the efficacy of certain drugs in the event I do fall ill. Plavix, for example, is less likely to help me should I need it, which is a very good thing to know for someone with the aforementioned predisposition towards atrial fibrillation. Knowing in advance that other alternatives might work better, could make all the difference. (On the sunnier side, should I ever need interferon, I am more likely than others to respond well to it.)

Another very useful bit of information was about diet. I am very physically active, but all my adult life I have had to work hard to keep the spare tire of 10 pounds or so off my stomach. I have usually combated this through exercise and a low-fat diet. Turns out that might not be the right approach for me; it might even be the problem. I have a gene that not only makes a low-fat diet ineffective, but actually makes things worse. With this gene, I am MORE likely to have extra pounds if I have a low-fat diet. Mind you, this isn't a licence to go and raid McDonald's every day: while I will benefit from much higher fat intake, it has to be high in just one variant of the good kind of fat, mono-unsaturated. So it's good-bye low-fat foods, hello nuts, poultry and oils like olive, canola, etc.

5) Genealogy. It confirmed what I already knew about my paternal side: Irish origins. Interestingly, on my mother's side it's a bit murkier than expected. I could be anything from Druze Muslim to Ashkenazi Jew to Basque (or something as prosaic as British origins, which is certainly the case going back the past few centuries, as my genealogical research confirms). Makes me wonder about the long path my ancestors took in their journey after Africa.

6) Getting an understanding for what I am fighting with v against. There are two possible attitudes one can take here. I can see a genetic predisposition towards not being a sprinter as an excuse not to run. Or I can take the attitude that I must try all that much harder, and note that the same trait leaves me more favorably disposed towards endurance running.

7) Having a laugh. In theory, I should more likely be a blue-eyed man of shorter than average height, with a balding head. (My eyes are hazel, I am 189cm tall and as of age 39, all the hair's still there and the shower drain is clean, knock on wood.)

All in all, I would certainly recommend the 23andme.com service. I have spent USD 99 on far stupider things. A word of warning, though: they do make you explicitly request to have certain results revealed to you, and you should consider that carefully. For example, when you log on for the first time after they finish your kit, most results are right there on the page; but for, say, Parkinson's, you have to click through a warning that basically asks, 'Are you SURE you want to know this?' It could be devastating. I was required to go through the same process for the Alzheimer's one. I opted to look because I figured it couldn't be worse than what I feared. (It wasn't. It was actually better: there's a 75% chance I will never develop it; worse odds than most people, but far better than I had feared.) But give that some careful thought before clicking through.

Beam me down, Scotty.

I said recently that there are some annoying aspects to sci-fi. But when I watch old episodes of Star Trek from the 1980s/1990s, as I did this past winter as the snow hemmed us all in, what strikes me is not how outlandish some of it is, but how much they underestimate the tide of science and technology. As I said in a recent post, there are those who suggest that we are nearing a technological singularity, a point past which society will be unrecognizable to those on this side of the singularity. I said then and repeat now that I am skeptical of this idea, but there are signs that something is hurtling towards us, for good or ill.

Look at some of the 'marvels' in those old Star Trek episodes:

-I recently saw an old episode recently in which they talked about the problem of it taking months before they could sequence a genome to find the problem at the crux of the episode. In the 24th century. In 2011, it takes a few weeks and the price is in the tens of thousands of dollars. I suspect that within a few short years, it will take days and cost hundreds. I have had mine partially sequenced for USD 99!

-In one episode, set in the future even in relation to the show's timeline, a man's sight was restored by implanting cloned eyes. A few years ago, a woman in Spain had a new windpipe implanted: it was essentially her own, as it had been 'manufactured' from an old one using her own cells.* Scientists are now experimenting with growing organs on demand. Liver failing? We'll grown you a new one and get it to you next week. That's not 24th century. That's probably a few years away.**

-In another scenario, that same blind man's clunky 'visor' was replaced with mechanical eyes a few years later. This 'breakthrough of the 24th century' is already happening now, in fact. The first primitive (60-pixel) prosthetic eyes have already been developed and approved for implantation. Wearers can at least discern light and up to eight colors, and see well enough to navigate safely. And that's version 1.0. I would be surprised if we didn't have HD-quality resolution that restored most sight within another generation or so, right here in the Dark Ages of the 21st century.

-Remember the old tricorders and communicators from the original show? My iPhone can do 1000 times more than those clunky things ever could.*** I can whip out this USD 199 device and do things Captain Picard would need his ship's computer to do.

-Speaking of computers. Are you kidding me? That piece of junk on the Enterprise often did things in hours that my laptop could do in minutes or even seconds. There are already supercomputers capable of memory and speed that are comparable to those of a human brain. In ten years, we'll probably have laptops of that capacity. And how about those huge computers on the original series?! Please. We surpassed those before Shatner bought his third toupee.

-On a related note, I saw an episode in which the characters were in awe of an android that performed at 60 teraflops. I am no expert on this, but from my admittedly cursory investigation, it seems that's peanuts! Our current supercomputers are measuring in petaflops, not teraflops.

So skip the beam-up, Scotty. I am doing just fine down here.

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Footnotes:

*You know who you are when I say that at least this time I remember where I read it.

**Well, assuming they can sort out the pesky issue with the connections: making an organ and hooking it up to the body's blood supply are two separate tasks, and it turns out the latter is harder. It's like being told that creating an HD TV from scratch is easy-peasy, but figuring out how to plug it in is superlatively difficult.

***Except getting me beamed up.

Beam me up, Scotty.

I love science fiction. There. I admitted it. Star Trek. Star Wars. Stargate. Star-whatever. I love it all. But I do have an issue with what I call the internal coherence problem.

Internal coherence means that no matter how odd the rules of the game may be - i.e., no matter how fantastic the sci-fi premise is - once those rules are laid out, the plot must adhere to those self-evinced rules once they are set. In other words, the plot must be coherent with respect to whatever rules were used to define its own universe. So make up the rules and make them as crazy as you like, but once they are made, you have to follow them. And if you fail to set out rules, then your plots must adhere to basic logic, even if the rules of physics are set aside for the sake of fun. Let's take some examples.

-Language. No surprise I am starting here! I have no problem with Star Trek's universal translator. It's a clever plot device, the linguistic equivalent to the very convenient transporter technology of that same show. And at least it helps to address the problem of why everyone in space appears to speak perfect English. But it should follow basic logic in its approach. For example, it either works or it doesn't: it is confusing when 90% of the time it is on automatic and translating everything people say, but then suddenly someone can say a word in another language, but that one word isn't translated.

One area where it shouldn't work, no matter how clever these 24th-century programmers are, is with a completely new language. I don't care how advanced your technology is, me saying to you, "Hello, I greet you in peace, and by the way, your starship is double-parked in a handicap zone and is about to be towed" does not provide sufficient information for you to decipher my entire language. You can't deduce "I'd like to order a pepperoni pizza" from someone saying, "Hey, I love your cool starship".

-Space. You'd think one no-brainer area for people writing about stuff happening in space would be, well, space. I guess we're just so accustomed to operating in two dimensions, that we just forget how much space there is in space! For example, sometimes a ship is 'surrounded' by enemies ahead and to their flanks. It's SPACE, not the ocean. Just go 'up' or 'down' instead of forward. (These terms are used loosely, because of course there is no 'up' or 'down' in space...there's no fixed body against which to measure something as 'up' or 'down'....which is sort of the point here.) The other major problem is sound, which can't exist in the vacuum of space; but I give them a pass on this one: you need sound as a dramatic effect.

-Planets: Again, if you're writing about outer space, this should be something you get right pretty frequently, but alas, no. Some oddball things about planets in sci-fi: 1) Why is it that despite these planets often being at least as big as (if not bigger than) Earth, everyone always crash lands in the same place? What are the odds that two ships from space, landing independently at different times and with no predetermined plan, would land in, say, Tuscon, Arizona in the US? Blindingly little chance. 2) Why is is that every planet save ours has a world government with a single capital for the whole planet, and everyone speaks the same language across this world? We have ca. 200 nations and speak over 6000 languages...why do aliens just have the one government and the one language?

-Aliens. Why does everyone is space look human, only with funny noses or foreheads or ears?! Strange as it may seem, this is actually one that doesn't bother me as much as the others due to a variant on the theme of the so-called Law of Mediocrity*: evolution will often find the same answers to the same or similar questions. So, if billions of years of evolution lead to the dominant species being a (relatively) big-brained biped with a nose, two eyes and two ears, then it is not unreasonable to expect a similar model if circumstances are similar elsewhere. And since our definition of intelligent life presupposes an Earth-like planet, it may be reasonable to expect intelligent beings from space to be not entirely different from humans. In theory. Possibly. [Insert your own generic long string of caveats here, because we have no way of testing this idea!]

-Matter matters. For reasons I don't understand, one favorite plot line across many sci-fi universes, is the 'matter-less being' plot. Example: there's an accident (or some crazy device involved) and characters X and Y become invisible to everyone and can pass through walls. Fine...it is sci-fi after all. But then, how do they stay standing on a floor? If gravity and matter are irrelevant to them, what affixes them to the floor even as they can walk through walls? Shouldn't they be able to dive through floors as easily as they walk through walls? Very confusing.

*Sigh* There, I feel better now. Now I can go back to watching more cheesy sci-fi.

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Footnotes:

*It's not really a law.

Bad Science and/or Bad Science Writing

This humorous article posted by a friend on Facebook got me to thinking about science writing. Poor science reporting is a pet peeve of mine. Sometimes it's difficult to suss out which is really bad: the science writing or the science itself....or both. Many writers reporting on science lack a scientific background themselves*, which makes it challenging enough; add in a reporter's need to sensationalize, and you often get some really horrendous science writing.

This disturbing tendency is particularly damaging when it comes to health-related science. "Research Suggests Consuming X Leads to Cancer" for example. How often do we see headlines like that? I can never tell what to take seriously, because it's difficult to tell who is doing a bad job: writer or researcher....or both...or neither (if in fact the conclusions are sound)? But taking the information at face value, I can't know how seriously to take it. People who eat X get cancer at a rate 1.5x higher than others. OK, but is that cause and effect? Correlation? Coincidence? Is it environmental? Genetic? For example, maybe the problem is that people who eat X have a taste for X because they possess a gene that makes them crave it, and that gene has a dual role, one that leads to a higher tendency towards cancer. Or maybe people who eat X like the taste and the substance has a taste similar to something else that is in fact causing the cancer. Or maybe it is coincidence. (Don't start with the 'no coincidences' thing!) If you take enough data about enough things and draw enough conclusions, you will sooner or later run into coincidences like this. It's not just possible: it's quite probable. Anyway, the point is that the permutations and possibilities are practically endless: genetics, environment, both, neither, coincidence, epigenetics or just plain flight of fancy....or some unimaginable combination of all.

Occasionally there are more mundane reasons for bad science reporting. I recently read an interesting piece in Discover magazine about taste. The writer said that everything Americans think they know about the 'map of the tongue' is in fact based on a very bad translation of a German study. So forget that bit about sour being on the sides, sweet on the tip or whatever.

And sometimes it is a question of science writers bowing to and passing on received 'wisdom', information that is passed along so many times that we all - including science writers who should know better - just believe it. Take that utter and complete nonsense about needing eight cups (64 oz, roughly 2 liters) of water a day. This ridiculous 'fact' is based on a bad journalist's laziness. In the 1990s, a New York Times reporter mentioned it in a piece. He had gotten it from a study done two generations earlier. Problem is, he didn't bother to read more than the 'eight cups' part: the study's author went on to say that 30-40% of that amount is gotten from our food anyway. Now we have an entire bottled-water industry built on the premise that if your urine isn't 100% clear, you're dying of kidney failure within the hour.

Bottom line: next time you read a science headline, take it with a grain of salt...but no more than a grain, as otherwise you'll die of heart failure immediately, according to a recent study.


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Footnotes:

*Not that there's anything wrong with that, says the science buff who has a degree in languages and who barely passed high school biology thanks to a distinct squeamishness about frog dissection.

It ain't the stupid people's fault; it's the smart ones who oughta know better, but don't

I can't remember where I read it, who said it (I seem to recall it was a 19th century American) or exactly how the quote goes, but it amounts to "The bad state of the world ain't the stupid people's fault; it's the fault of the smart ones who oughta know better, but don't."

When I was growing up, I labored under a blissful illusion: somewhere, somehow, a bunch of really smart people were out there making the world a better place, and doing so at a steady, methodical pace using rigorous scientific means. To take one example: I always thought medicine was the paragon of such scientific (and beneficent) efficiency. In my imaginary world, when you went to the doctor, the doctor examined each symptom, checked the results against some impressive (but, as it turns out, entirely imaginary) database, went through checklists and arrived at both a diagnosis and a treatment based on the best available data from the world of medicine. In turn, s/he logged the results of this diagnosis, treatment and outcome into this fictional database, strengthening the field of medicine with ever more data. As I reached adulthood, this illusion was slowly destroyed, replaced with the reality that (again, to pick on medicine) doctors basically just muddle through as best they can, relying on their training and whatever attempts they care to make at staying abreast of current trends in their field.

So as an adult, I have slowly come to learn what a rather inefficient, unproductive world it is that we occupy. Even in areas where one expects competence and intelligence, too much digging results in disappointment. Picking on medicine here again, take the example of back pain. For decades (if not centuries), the standard treatment for 'throwing out one's back' has been bed rest. In fact, it has been conventional wisdom for so long, few bother to question it. Doctors to this day routinely tell their prostrated patients to take it easy, stay in bed. There's only one problem. Scientific evidence suggests that not only is bed rest not a good idea, it can actually prolong the problem. Moderate exercise, though initially uncomfortable, is considerably more effective a treatment. I can attest to this through personal experience: after reading this rather astonishing screw-you to conventional wisdom, I acted on it. I throw my back out a couple of times a year. I used to just lie in bed waiting for the pain to pass. Now, I drag myself out the door and, painful as it is at first, I walk. It's a little embarrassing since I am bent over a good 45 degrees or so, and I creep along at around one mile per hour. But sure enough, after 10-20 minutes, I am walking upright and the pain is all but gone. The old 'cure' of lying in bed left me prostrate for at least the whole day.

This is not meant to suggest that doctors are incompetent or even, for that matter, that they universally prescribe bed rest for back pain! The point is, why aren't we as a society doing a better job of simply documenting, compiling and cross-referencing our experiential data and then rationally acting on the results? In medicine, science, public policy and, yes, religion and ethics, we consistently fail to act on the evidence we accumulate so easily. I can forgive religion: it's entirely premised on accepting things blindly on faith. But what's science's excuse? And medicine's? Healthcare workers aren't even utilizing the humble checklist routinely, a simple 'no-brainer' that could save countless lives.* And what is the excuse of public policy 'experts' when they continue to prescribe courses of action that have failed repeatedly, ignoring policies that have proven to be successful? The easy answer is that people are just foolish. The harder but more worthwhile answer is that we have a lot of work to do in educating even the 'smart' people to follow a more rigorous approach to their respective endeavors.

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Footnotes

*Yes, checklists. That most basic of things. You'd be surprised how rarely it is used. Imagine if every significant procedure at a hospital required a checklist. 'Did you check for contraindications? y/n; if y then proceed; else, check' 'Did you cross-reference the bed chart with the computer records before performing the procedure? y/n; if y then proceed; else, cross-reference'